If I am not mistaken this really only applied to non-magic based characters. I could swear (I could also be misremembering) leveling a barb a million times in D2 and thinking, "damn I wish a new weapon would drop because the damage on this one sucks and it is slowing me down".

If I am not mistaken this really only applied to non-magic based characters. I could swear (I could also be misremembering) leveling a barb a million times in D2 and thinking, "damn I wish a new weapon would drop because the damage on this one sucks and it is slowing me down".

That's correct; the melee characters generally required high-damage weapons, unless you were (ab)using Crushing Blow, because most of those skills added % damage (which is another fun trick nostalgia plays ... anyone else remember when Zeal only added accuracy and not damage??).

It wasn't much of an issue in D2 however because there were several weapons that were guaranteed to roll with high damage. You didn't run into a situation where you found the unique you were looking for but it was garbage because the damage rolled to low. This was also coupled with the fact that once you had the damage, you could get the other stats elsewhere; that is, you also didn't run into a situation where you found the uniqu you were looking for and the damage rolled high, but it was garbage because you didn't get a high STR roll.

This goes back to what I was saying about needing everything instead of just a few stats from each piece.

IMO, afer all is said and done, it all about the end game. D3 has no interesting end game so it needs to rely on loot.
Problem is D3 loot is boring. All random numbers.
Also being able to inspect someone else gear is stupid, all novice players are doing is looking at experience players profile and copying. No challenge.

D2 had good hard caps example FCR / All resist / FHR and you needed to be clever to reach certain breakpoint to get that edge.

Remember all
D2 was released in 2000 - excellent at it time
D3 was released in 2012 - rubbish considering what on the market.

That's correct; the melee characters generally required high-damage weapons, unless you were (ab)using Crushing Blow, because most of those skills added % damage (which is another fun trick nostalgia plays ... anyone else remember when Zeal only added accuracy and not damage??).

Well I think that answers the question then.

The problem in D2 was not "intrinsic power" - it was simply the fact that certain classes could run around killing shit without a weapon while others required a weapon to kill things.

It makes sense, but it also creates s gameplay imbalance to have certain classes being completely dependent on their weapon while others can run around without a weapon and play effectively. That's why it changed. It's the kind of obvious logic that you have to sit back and think the only people who could possibly be irked with this are casters... since melee toons and Zons have been tied to their weapon damage forever.

The rest of your post is obviously accurate about itemization. But I just don't understand this "well it's OK for some classes in D2 to be tied to weapon damage, but GODDAMNIT IF YOU MAKE THEM ALL TIED TO WEAPON DAMAGE YOU'VE COMPLETELY FUCKED UP THE INTRINSIC POWER OF MY CHARACTER" train of thought.

All it amounts to was a slight nerf to spellcasters (in that they simply couldn't ignore weapon damage any longer). Physical damage toons carry on as if nothing ever really changed. This is a huge deal? Really? To me it sounds like massively trumped-up faux outrage.

There are a hundred other points of contention with "itemization" that I could understand. This doesn't even register in the top 1000 for me. The impact is marginal and insanely overblown.

That's correct; the melee characters generally required high-damage weapons, unless you were (ab)using Crushing Blow, because most of those skills added % damage (which is another fun trick nostalgia plays ... anyone else remember when Zeal only added accuracy and not damage??).

Well I think that answers the question then.

The problem in D2 was not "intrinsic power" - it was simply the fact that certain classes could run around killing shit without a weapon while others required a weapon to kill things.

It makes sense, but it also creates s gameplay imbalance to have certain classes being completely dependent on their weapon while others can run around without a weapon and play effectively. That's why it changed. It's the kind of obvious logic that you have to sit back and think the only people who could possibly be irked with this are casters... since melee toons and Zons have been tied to their weapon damage forever.

The rest of your post is obviously accurate about itemization. But I just don't understand this "well it's OK for some classes in D2 to be tied to weapon damage, but GODDAMNIT IF YOU MAKE THEM ALL TIED TO WEAPON DAMAGE YOU'VE COMPLETELY FUCKED UP THE INTRINSIC POWER OF MY CHARACTER" train of thought.

All it amounts to was a slight nerf to spellcasters (in that they simply couldn't ignore weapon damage any longer). Physical damage toons carry on as if nothing ever really changed. This is a huge deal? Really? To me it sounds like massively trumped-up faux outrage.

There are a hundred other points of contention with "itemization" that I could understand. This doesn't even register in the top 1000 for me. The impact is marginal and insanely overblown.

They could have also gone the other way on this, they could have made melee classes less dependant on their weapons rather than making everyone completely dependent.

I would argue its about striking a balance between intrinsic power and extrinsic power. If you neglect intrinsic power then the feeling of your characters growth feels artificial dependent on his-her items. it's like a soldier who goes from using a rifle to driving a tank the soldiers ability has not improved just his weapon has, Though he can certainly overpower most enemies, but at the end the day he's a pussy not a mighty hero.(just like Grindelwald haha)

i do find it offensive and odd that my wizards power primarily depends on the power of his weapon/items, a wizards power should grow as his mastery and learning grows finding weapons should just augment that power....it even goes against the archetype of the class as blizzard caste it.

in the same way i dont think it makes sense for a melee character to be completely item dependent either, a great warriors power is the result of his strength and prowess not just of how sharp or deadly his weapon is.

basically role playing games are about mimicing or enhancing the kind of reward systems we find in the real-world, in the real world your abilities improve as a result both of you investing time in them(skill-improvement) and as a result of acquiring good tools(Items).

so a good RPG needs to manage skill improvement(Intrinsic power) and item acquisition(extrinsic power) in a way which mimics that found in the real world. IMO diablo 2 struck a better balance between these two aspects and thus going back to the OP...

Getting that balance right will help you to make the best game possible for your resources.

^this guy is spot on. kudos. characters *shouldn't* be useless wussies who can't kill a Fallen without gear. a Wizard or a WD should still be able to hold his own/ kill stuff without any gear... as it is in D3, if you unequip the weapon you're rendered completely impotent and all your spells suddenly don't work at all. how can anyone be ok with that? t.t

You're right about the balance being off when a Sorc can kill stuff naked and a Barbarian can't.

However, this is low-end balance.

Give the Sorc a Staff/Wand with +%spelldamage, give the Barb a weapon with +flat damage, work it out so intrinsic spell dps*%spelldamage ~~ intrinsic %skilldamage*weapon flat damage. Easy enough, right? The archetypes aren't ruined, the players who want immersion aren't thrown off because their fireballs get stronger while using Skorn and having attack speed on their rings... there's balance in the endgame anyway.

What does it matter if a naked Sorc can kill a pack of monsters in 30s and a Baba can't when, if geared with only average weapons, both can kill stuff in 5s? Is this such a huge problem that you'd go out of your way to change how casters have worked mechanically and in people's minds since forever ago? Incidentally, if you've played other more traditional RPGs, the tradeoff for lategame casters' intrinsic strength being higher was that they had a harder levelling experience. You could incorporate that into Diablo's design, even though I don't think it necessary here.

Not to mention that magic find is no longer an issue, apparently. Personally I'd be happier if it was possible for them to design a situation where the MFer is finding just a little more loot than the XPer, but the XPer is gaining just a little more XP than the MFer. This has proved to be an impossible problem to solve (for any game that I know of) so it's all down to clear speed now in D3. So low end balance is largely irrelevant.

Good "lower end" balance is much better for the journey to the end-game, and to the experience of other types of gamers.

There's a reason why so many people enjoyed and praised D3 throughout the first 3 difficulties. Instead of that, shaft the melee characters and let specific classes run rampant.

There's no need to cling to old-school traditional D&D RPG mechanics, specially in a RPG that has made its name by not following those and by focusing more on the action part of it.

No, you didn't catch my drift.
What I mean by 'lower-end' is naked casters being able to kill stuff and naked warriors not being able to do the same thing. You are wearing a piece of gear from the getgo in Diablo3. This never applies. You have to go out of your way, unequip your stuff as the barb to see that you're powerless. Low level balance can be perfect with just average weapons found through regular questing.

It works like this. Caster abilities aren't %weapondamage, they're flat damage. And they are augmented with +spelldamage% gear. Melee/Archer abilities are %weapondamage and are augmented by flat damage weapons. Work out your items so the equations balance themselves out. It works for new players, old players, early and endgame with no real balance issues, and it doesn't break the lore of the genre.

Give the Sorc a Staff/Wand with +%spelldamage, give the Barb a weapon with +flat damage, work it out so intrinsic spell dps*%spelldamage ~~ intrinsic %skilldamage*weapon flat damage.

I agree with you wholeheartedly from a conceptual standpoint. "Spell damage" makes a ton more sense for a magic-user than "weapon damage" does. But this discussion really isn't about those semantics (otherwise I'd have long since stoped trying to discuss, because it's not worth semantics). This discussion is about "casters should never be dependent on weapons the way they are in D3."

Your solution is very much the most logical solution and it's how WoW does it. Casters in WoW, however, still value their weapon above and beyond every other item they have because it has the largest contribution to spell power of any other source. They are still dependent on their weapons for their performance. The people I'm disagreeing with are actually disagreeing with your "spell power" suggestion too. They want NO DEPENDENCE on a statistic like weapon damage or spell damage. They want casters to behave 100% like they behaved in D2 - the wand could have 1-2 damage or 100-200 damage, the only thing that mattered was the magical properties. Therefore a level 1 wand with perfect properties would automatically be a "BiS" item even though it was available at ... level 1.

The issue Zero brings up about low-level balance doesn't manifest itself in the system until you go on a dry streak with weapon drops. If you allow SOME classes to be independant of the major statistic on a weapon then, while progressing through levels, they have a much easier time. Imagine in D3 if wizards and WDs only cared about stats on their weapons, so that 45 DPS +200 int sword you found at level 20 lasts you well into your 50s. But the barb who finds a 45 DPS +200 str level 20 weapon realizes that it is unusable by level 30 because the DPS is unacceptable. That kind of gameplay "advantage" is just unnecessary and I don't see why anyone would ever advocate that kind of system. I realize that 1-60 isn't a big deal, but there's just no reason to give certain classes that ease when it comes to any aspect of the game.

Like I said, your suggestion of differentiating "weapon damage" and "spell power" is absoltuely a very, very, viable solution (and one you'd hear absolutely no complaining from me if they implemented). But it's still going to provide the same scenario that people who think that "weapons matter too much" are currently complaining about. What you've suggested is a great idea and I fully support it, but it wouldn't actually change this conversation. The same people complaining in this thread that D3 toons are "too dependent on their weapons" would continue to complain even though your suggestion fixes the "conceptual" problem with spells using "weapon damage" in their calculation.

EDIT
You're right that, at its heart, this isn't even an "endgame" discussion. I don't see many people of any class in any Diablo game, running around at max level not using a weapon just for shits and giggles. Even if you're only equipping weapons for their magical properties and not their actual damage, it's not like a RATIONAL person was not using weapons. So the whole idea of "too much is tied to weapons" is largely semantics. Which is exactly what I don't get. It's not THAT BIG OF A DEAL... yet some people act as if it's the downfall of modern gaming or something. The focus placed on a largely-irrelevant change, I simply don't get.

Yeah, this is why I mentioned magic find in my first post. Given that everyone is only trying to max out killspeed, any benefits the spellcaster might have in a situation where extremely good MF gear exists that only casters are able to wear because they're the only ones capable of killing stuff, even if at punishingly lower rates, without proper items (think of the Gull dagger, if I recall the name correctly) no longer applies.
This was a concern when D3 was released. MF was still extremely relevant back then. This will very likely not be the case any longer with the expansion. Kill speed is really everything.

Of course I agree that everyone should need a weapon, and even be crippled by a bad one. But it makes sense for the casters to be a little less crippled, from a lore standpoint, and from a gameplay/balance standpoint 'how' crippled is irrelevant given good itemization and drop rates, since there's no benefit to be gained by staying 'just a little' crippled. The balance point could be an average rolled blue weapon for all I care, you know?

Quote from "shaggy" »

EDIT
You're right that, at its heart, this isn't even an "endgame" discussion. I don't see many people of any class in any Diablo game, running around at max level not using a weapon just for shits and giggles. Even if you're only equipping weapons for their magical properties and not their actual damage, it's not like a RATIONAL person was not using weapons. So the whole idea of "too much is tied to weapons" is largely semantics. Which is exactly what I don't get. It's not THAT BIG OF A DEAL... yet some people act as if it's the downfall of modern gaming or something. The focus placed on a largely-irrelevant change, I simply don't get.

Of course, it's semantics. And I never gave a rat's ass about why the shotguns in FPS games can deal 80% of the damage of something like the nuke launcher. It's an FPS, it's just numbers, who cares, let's have some fun.

However, Diablo is an aRPG. It's supposed to follow, at least on some conceptual levels, the design of RPGs. It's supposed to give you at least some feeling of immersion. This is why it becomes kind of a big deal for me and probably many others as well. Not a dealbreaker, not the #1 issue, but it's high on the list.

Good "lower end" balance is much better for the journey to the end-game, and to the experience of other types of gamers.

There's a reason why so many people enjoyed and praised D3 throughout the first 3 difficulties. Instead of that, shaft the melee characters and let specific classes run rampant.

There's no need to cling to old-school traditional D&D RPG mechanics, specially in a RPG that has made its name by not following those and by focusing more on the action part of it.

No, you didn't catch my drift.
What I mean by 'lower-end' is naked casters being able to kill stuff and naked warriors not being able to do the same thing. You are wearing a piece of gear from the getgo in Diablo3. This never applies. You have to go out of your way, unequip your stuff as the barb to see that you're powerless. Low level balance can be perfect with just average weapons found through regular questing.

It works like this. Caster abilities aren't %weapondamage, they're flat damage. And they are augmented with +spelldamage% gear. Melee/Archer abilities are %weapondamage and are augmented by flat damage weapons. Work out your items so the equations balance themselves out. It works for new players, old players, early and endgame with no real balance issues, and it doesn't break the lore of the genre.

Why are melee/archers in the same group? Why not archers/casters? Why not melee/casters in the same group? Which ability is a spellcast and which isn't? If I'm a monk and I see an item with spelldamage should it be completely useless to me? People are already bitching to no end about how much of a waste Int-gear on a monk is. Imagine you create another 3 affixes that are can only be used by one character each and are COMPLETELY useless to the others.

The bigger issue is the progression... or to be precise the lack of progression. If your mage hits level 60 and *boom* he sits at 50k dps naked, while the barb hits lvl 60 and sits at 1k dps... Who is going to have a more fun experience finding upgrades? Lets say a dedicated player can farm up to 75k dps, how is that going to feel for the mage? He's only able to find 20 upgrades and the he is already capped. The barbarian will find 200 upgrades until he reaches his own 75k dps. People HATE the lack of rewards for playing the game, and if you make casters naturally strong, this HAS to mean they dont progress as fast or as much as classes that aren't naturally strong. How does this benefit the game? Just so some guys can ironman mode with 4 casters through inferno? There are faaar better ways to accomplish that.

I NEVER understood how people justify this stupid, stupid "mages deal a fixed amount of damage" bullshit. It makes no sense at all in a progress based game and I am 100% certain that making meteor deal 5000 base damage isnt going to improve the game. I am 100% certain that making meteor deal 15000 base damage is going to improve the game and I am 100% certain that making meteor deal 65000 base damage isn't going to improve the game.
The problem people have with the current system is another one, namely, how imbalanced weapons and their affixes are and THAT should be looked at, not at how much damage a mage/ranger/melee can deal while being naked....

Yeah, this is why I mentioned magic find in my first post. Given that everyone is only trying to max out killspeed, any benefits the spellcaster might have in a situation where extremely good MF gear exists that only casters are able to wear because they're the only ones capable of killing stuff, even if at punishingly lower rates, without proper items (think of the Gull dagger, if I recall the name correctly) no longer applies.
This was a concern when D3 was released. MF was still extremely relevant back then. This will very likely not be the case any longer with the expansion. Kill speed is really everything.

Of course I agree that everyone should need a weapon, and even be crippled by a bad one. But it makes sense for the casters to be a little less crippled, from a lore standpoint, and from a gameplay/balance standpoint 'how' crippled is irrelevant given good itemization and drop rates, since there's no benefit to be gained by staying 'just a little' crippled. The balance point could be an average rolled blue weapon for all I care, you know?

Could you please elaborate that "lore-standpoint" that makes it logical for casters to deal more damage without weapons? From a lore standpoint all casters deal the same damage with every fireball, from a lore standpoint casters shouldnt have any equipment at all. From a lore standpoint all weapons do the exact same thing: you hit with them and anything you hit with any axe ever made, dies. Because you know... that's how lore works after all.

However, Diablo is an aRPG. It's supposed to follow, at least on some conceptual levels, the design of RPGs. It's supposed to give you at least some feeling of immersion. This is why it becomes kind of a big deal for me and probably many others as well. Not a dealbreaker, not the #1 issue, but it's high on the list.

I get the idea of immersion side of a game and it really can make a difference, but when the lore starts to affect the balance of a game is where you lose me.

Lore wise is there any reason why melee classes should get an automatic 30% damage reduction in D3? As far as I know, no there isn't, but it is/was* a necessary evil for the game otherwise everyone would just be rolling around playing ranged classes because it the DR makes that big of a difference.

EDIT: Point being games should not sacrifice their game play/fun just for the sake of lore.

*not sure if it is still a necessary evil in the game at this point, but it certainly was back in the early stages of the game when going defensive was the only way to build a character

You need explanations about what Wizards are, and why it is that Archers and Warriors rely on their skills with weapons while Wizards rely on their knowledge which they channel through their weapons?

They just do.

I mean, this is like explaining what a Wizard is. Read any book/novel or watch any movie involving these mythos. I don't know who had the idea that Wizards should be Wizards, just like I don't know who had the idea that a dragon breathes fire. It's the lore and it's how the various fantasy worlds have always depicted it. It's not based on reality or any factual information (there are no wizards around irl yo), hence it's the 'lore'.

It's like, a jedi uses a lightsaber and that's that. That's 'lore'.

I may be getting trolled here, so no more replies

Quote from "Tralfamadore" »

I get the idea of immersion side of a game and it really can make a difference, but when the lore starts to affect the balance of a game is where you lose me.

Lore wise is there any reason why melee classes should get an automatic 30% damage reduction in D3? As far as I know, no there isn't, but it is/was* a necessary evil for the game otherwise everyone would just be rolling around playing ranged classes because it the DR makes that big of a difference.

*not sure if it is still a necessary evil in the game at this point, but it certainly was back in the early stages of the game when going defensive was the only way to build a character

I just responded to this above, didn't I? Balance isn't affected at all by any of this. Balance wise, flat intrinsic spell damage*spelldamage%=intrinsic skill damage%*flat weapon damage = constant. No worries about balance. It really is only semantics.

Let's do another exercise. Say the devs want everyone to be killing stuff at X speed. So they design a normal swing of your weapon to do X damage. But they don't want people to just swing their swords, they want to give them cool abilities to use with them. So the ability does 200% of normal damage, then it gets factorized by 0.5 to get back to 'killing speed is X'. Balance wise, this is the same as the original weapon swing, it just has a cool new animation/properties. Now let's imagine the devs want damage types, for example poison that can apply a dot on hit, fire that can burn on crit etc. Now they have to refactor the abilities so 'killing speed is X'. Again, nothing changed balance wise, it's only added flavor, what could be called 'semantics'.
The same applies to crit and crit damage. Again, it's only flavor. We could be dealing the same exact damage value for all eternity and the result would be the same, balance wise. Most people would also call this boring.

Some people don't like flavor, and that's ok. Some people don't care about Wizards using attack speed and axes, and some people might not care if arrows were called spells and you could shoot them out of a hammer instead of a bow. This is all semantics, after all, the damage will apply and the monster will die regardless.

I just responded to this above, didn't I? Balance isn't affected at all by any of this. Balance wise, flat intrinsic spell damage*spelldamage%=intrinsic skill damage%*flat weapon damage = constant. No worries about balance. It really is only semantics.

Let's do another exercise. Say the devs want everyone to be killing stuff at X speed. So they design a normal swing of your weapon to do X damage. But they don't want people to just swing their swords, they want to give them cool abilities to use with them. So the ability does 200% of normal damage, then it gets factorized by 0.5 to get back to 'killing speed is X'. Balance wise, this is the same as the original weapon swing, it just has a cool new animation/properties. Now let's imagine the devs want damage types, for example poison that can apply a dot on hit, fire that can burn on crit etc. Now they have to refactor the abilities so 'killing speed is X'. Again, nothing changed balance wise, it's only added flavor, what could be called 'semantics'.
The same applies to crit and crit damage. Again, it's only flavor. We could be dealing the same exact damage value for all eternity and the result would be the same, balance wise. Most people would also call this boring.

Some people don't like flavor, and that's ok. Some people don't care about Wizards using attack speed and axes, and some people might not care if arrows were called spells and you could shoot them out of a hammer instead of a bow. This is all semantics, after all, the damage will apply and the monster will die regardless.

And yet, it might not really feel right. Catch my drift now?

I completely understand what you are saying and if Blizzard decided to make it so, it wouldn't bother me one bit. Although it still doesn't change my post above and my distension to lore affecting balance. There is zero reason lore wise as to why it is there, yet it is there and provides ample utility towards the game play, fun and really seems to get brushed over when mentioning lore/immersion.

D2's itemization WASN'T good. You'll get people that argued for pvp you had to max certain stats or you were dead (like hit recovery) and for PVE (like FCR and lifesteal ect), but that didn't actually make D2's itemization 'good'.

The EXACT same problems plagued D3 as in D2; Only a handful of certain items were good, because they had all the right stats on them. Almost all builds of the same class used the same items, and the rest were left in the dust because of how bad they were.

BUT, the reason you're going to see people rage at me for even mentioning that D2's itemization was horrible, is because it gave the illusion that it was at least all right, because even though you had like I said before a handful of items that were by far the best, you *could* use almost any item you wanted and still be successful. That's not because of good itemization, that's because by the time you were level 85 or around there, you out-leveled the game by so much that you could roflstomp hell mode with relative ease using whatever combination of gear you wanted.

Because D3 has inferno mode, every monster out levels you and we don't have broken affixes like crushing blow, skills like sorc's static, the game is actually hard. Because of how hard D3 is (compared to D2), it forces people to actually try and stack both DPS increasing gear and EHP increases, which with the current state of gear makes it near impossible to FIND all the gear you need, thus, bad itemization.

Now I'm a die hard D2 fan, but at least I can sit back and look at exactly what was going on. *queue up people raging*

I have to call BS on your arguments about PVP. PVP in diablo 2 wasn't special but there was a lot more build diversity than this game has. In regards to your issues with itemization, you're again mistaken. Due to the types of build diversity people could make plenty of viable builds and changes to their characters and still be perfectly fine. Diablo PVE for the most part was a terrible gauge for items because you outleveled the content so you can only judge an items value based on its PVP quality.

Lets look at a zealer paladin for example. I'll speak in generalities because I don't remember the names of all the items and runewords anymore.

you could wear 4-5 different helms (vamp,shako, CoA, runeword helms)
you could wear 4-5 different chest armors (runeword, shaftstop, tyreals might, leviatian, etc)
rings/amulets varied but there were crafted, rare and uniques in the mix
boots/gloves/belts all varied crafted,rare,unique were in the mix
weapons- rares uniques and runewords were all used

When you look at d3 in comparison. Everyone uses pretty much the same gear outside of weapons which are rare and jewelry.

For the most part for barbs you're either wearing a nice IK helm for budge reasons or a mempo
you're wearing ik armor
you're using innas pants
you're using witching hour belt sometimes IK
you're using ik gloves or rare trifecta
weapon is echoing fury or a rare
jewelry is crafted
shoulders crafted
boots pretty much always ice climbers maybe ik boots

and everyone has the same cookie cutter 2h build or WW build..yes it varies some.

Both games have their positives and negatives but overall d2 allowed you to customize your character and build it around the gear. In diablo 3 your character minus the skills you use is already done and you have to find the best gear based on the primary attribute and then obviously the trifecta stats.

Diablo 2's itemization was more appealing because there was no hard level cap and you could use the gear for any character because there was no primary stat forcing you to stick with one class. Then of course you have the ability to get pretty much great uniques 90% of the time saving the affix roll which was much more forgiving in most cases than compared to diablo 3. Additionally the only items you ever really had to reroll a few times before getting to perfection were runewords..which still were overpowered for pve standards.

Either way diablo 2's itemization was praised because you always felt rewarded when you found something and items were much easier to come by.

The big difference for me between D2 and D3 was the randomization of stats. In D2 you kind of knew how the most popular items could roll. In D3 The items are all over the place. Its as if every item in D3 is a stat trinket that has like a million different ways they can roll.

This is frustrating for me personally and it gets worse considering D3 is a harder game and you have to have very specific stats to survive the content.

@Mini641
That's exactly how I see it myself. In Diablo 3, all the legendaries are just templates that can be filled with something good, but garbage in the most cases. And this is what is responsible for destroying the excitement about loot for me by a huge amount. When a legendary drops, I don't think "awesome, finally I found the legendary I was looking for", but "great, another crap to carry around", because it's safe to assume that it indeed is crap.

This wasn't the case in Diablo 2. When a Unique Shako dropped, I got excited (at least in the beginning of a ladder saison). Or in 1.09, the standard uniques were a lot more valuable because of worse rune words. So finding an Arkaine's Valor already brought up a lot of excitement when you saw "Balrog Skin" on the floor with the unique golden font color. The same for Hydra Bow or Colossus Blade. You just knew, even if the stats didn't roll perfectly, it still is an awesome drop.

Somehow I must give the fault for this to the importance of main stats. Those are among the most important stats on items so if you put an item on your char, it basically must have a lot of the main stat. This implies that there are either class specific legendaries for each class, which come with the corresponding main stat at all times or it's random (this is what we have now). While both ways have flaws, Blizzard imo chose the more flawed way and drove this even further by making not only the main stat vary, but giving every legendary at least one random property.

I think, they don't have enough sensitivity to get the loot right. All they knew when they planned the whole loot system was, randomness is good for a game like Diablo. But they went too far with this and didn't just implement randomness, but randomness³ (people probably would have loved so much randomness for the dungeons and outdoor environments, but not loot). I just have the feeling they didn't think this through. When they described Inferno mode, Jay Wilson said his famous phrase "and then we doubled it". I am pretty sure they did this with a lot of stuff (including randomness) because they just thought it's the right way to go.

Stat requirements - do you want a characters stats to affect the items they are able to equip?Level requirement - do you want a characters level to affect when they can equip the itemItem Quality- do you want all items to be able to roll a specific quality and will you have a unique version of the item?Attributes given - what kind attributes can the items have in your game? Can a helms defense be enhanced by a modifier?Attribute rolls - Will the helms defense roll be able to high or low?Aesthetics - Will an item catch the players eye when on the floor or equipped by another player?

The above are a few very basic things to consider about items inside of D2. To drill down into the nitty gritty parts of items a good way is to compare D2 and D3.

D2 and D3 differ drastically on how they handle items and that is because of the top point, stat requirements.

Due to the removal of the mechanic stat allocation, items could no longer have stat requirements, which means that items in D3 carry purely numerical advantages over one another and the only boundary to equip said item is a level requirement which becomes defunct at level cap.

Level cap is something also different about D2 and D3, whilst there was a hard cap for D2, many items were scattered among different character levels and people very rarely reached the hard cap, a question the developers must of asked themselves is does this add more flavor or does it provide just another annoying roadblock?

We see that there is no boundaries to equip an item outside of character class in D3 and we are left with the question: are boundaries fun?

When we consider stat allocation in conjunction with stat requirements on items, you start to see how customization of your characters stats start to weave themselves into not only a numerical advantage such as having more strength to do more damage but allowing you to equip heavier swords/armors.

This translates into aesthetics, if i can assign points on my character, I can equip a different sword type and therefore have a different look, meaning your investment into a stat has changed the way your character looks in the world, and adds more weight to your decision.

We then consider the inability for the majority of Diablo 2s lifespan to reset stats, thus meaning when you place points into strength to put that sword or armor on you're stuck with it, adding more weight to your decision.

It is shown that items become an embodiment of your decisions and ultimately your character reflects all your cumulative decisions. I can't honestly say Diablo 2 did a tremendous job of this but the concept was there and it added a bit of "heart" to items.

Other games have also used this concept of weaving stats and items together to create a very deep sense of game play, a few examples would be: Baldurs Gate, Icewind Dale, Dungeon Siege 1, the best to show this concept in my opinion however is Dark Souls.

I'm not going to say which is better or worse, because sometimes boundaries piss people off, having the freedom of item choice in D3 is nice, stats became less of a choice and more of "dump loads into str and X and the rest in vit" in D2 which means that sometimes a player could become disenchanted with the system and just outright annoyed by it.

The cruel reality is of all this is you just can't please everyone and as a developer it winds me up so much and is something I eventually had to accept, there will always be people who dislike the games i craft and people who want to man hug IRL.

I wish you luck in development of your game

Wow thanks for the lengthy response! I really enjoy longer posts, they (usually) contain more information.

The way the item system works essentially is there are 7 different item types:
Staves - Have weapon damage which affects skills. It can have a % Damage modifier to increase the weapon damage
2H Staves - Have weapon damage which affects skills (higher than normal staves), but cannot equip a shield with it. It can have a % Damage modifier to increase the weapon damage
Shields - Have Armor (there is a % Armor modifier to increase the value on the item itself) and block chance
Boots, Chest, Helm - Have Armor and a potential % Armor modifier
Skill Gems - Equippable spells/abilities that can level up if equipped, and unlock bonus effects every levels (up to 15)

The way the game works, item requirements would be more annoying than anything else.
The passive skill tree doesn't have stats, because there are no base stats in this game, but I've gone back and forth on adding them.

What would stat points add to the game if they were not a part of item requirements?